Tuesday, 18 July 2017

From the archive: "Victim"

Although it's hardly Bruce LaBruce, Victim was considered shocking back in 1961 for its treatment of (the then-illegal matter of) homosexuality; today, it looks both groundbreaking and fascinatingly awkward, obliging its audience to insinuate and extrapolate that which the film's network of well-spoken gays can only hint at. Dirk Bogarde is the high-flying lawyer whose wings are clipped when his past - and, more specifically, ties to a dead (rent?) boy - embroils him in a plot to blackmail London's queer community. Shot mostly on location by Basil Dearden (The Blue Lamp), this has the gritty, noirish feel of late 50s British urban cinema, but also a strain of drawing-room debate in which Bogarde's "outsider", assuming the role of detective, adopts a more aggressive and antagonistic line of questioning than your average copper, provoked by the social mores of the time. The script - by Janet Green and John McCormick - can feel a little too hung up on notions of "normal" and "abnormal" (Bogarde's wife Sylvia Syms runs a clinic for delinquents) for it to entirely convince nowadays, but you keep spying flickers of all those issues later queer cinema would find itself working through: a strain of virulent self-hatred that Bogarde pushes to the max ("Nature played me a dirty trick") and a genuinely edgy, uncomfortable response to women. Syms has a slightly more complex characterisation than one might expect, but the turncoat's a bitter harridan with a neurotic disgust of pretty much everyone, especially the sad, lonely men classed as criminals at the centre of the piece.

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About Me

Mike was born in Warwickshire in 1978. He has written on film for The Scotsman since 2002, for The Telegraph since 2003, for The Guardian since 2012, and for the Reader's Digest since 2016. In the intervening years, he has appeared on Radio 4's "Today" programme and - with a degree of randomness befitting the man - BBC2's "Working Lunch". He has also contributed to the home-viewing reference guide "The DVD Stack" (Canongate, 2006; second edition 2007) and Halliwell's "The Movies That Matter" (HarperCollins, 2008).